Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is an important statement but, I must say, one that lacks the sorts of initiatives I would have appreciated as a result of the inquiry, the so-called Hawker committee, that the member for Chisholm spoke about at some length. I congratulate her and the members of that committee on their diligence in taking that inquiry upon themselves and reporting as they did to government.

The greatest deficiency, not in their efforts but in the report, is that local government did not make a case for the clearly defined responsibilities and services they thought they would be best placed to provide to the Australian community, and whence the financial resources to do those tasks might come. Notwithstanding that an intergovernmental agreement has been reached, as recommended by the committee, it seems to be a fairly fluffy arrangement from my perspective.

The minister advises us that the agreement addresses cost shifting by obtaining in-principle agreement from governments that, when a responsibility is devolved to local government, local government is consulted and the financial and other impacts on local government are taken into account. There is nothing wrong with that. For instance, when state governments pass legislation that says that health surveyors will go out and monitor some new piece of state legislation, that can be costed, presumably, if we are lucky.

The reality is of course that cost shifting has evolved simply by default. State governments in particular have had a habit of just not doing things. There has been debate in this chamber about it. I note that the member for Lalor this morning put a case that the Australian government should have total responsibility for health services. I wonder how that might change the fact that, of my 50 local authorities, 90 per cent are obliged to have a very significant budget commitment to keeping a doctor in town. We say that local government has moved on from roads, rates and rubbish, but that was the fundamental responsibility that was accepted when people said that local government was a creature of the states. They evolved as service organisations of great width and had primarily only one source of money: the rates they levied on their ratepayers. Then of course they got moneys from state governments in certain areas, and the minister’s speech gave us clear evidence of the volatility of those sorts of grants. They go up by 80 per cent and then crash by 60 per cent; how a local authority can budget in those circumstances, I do not know. By comparison, the Whitlam government—and let me give credit to them—introduced the FAG Scheme, as we know it.

I had the privilege, I guess, of being a state grants commissioner during my 16 years in local government prior to coming to this place. I was one of the first grants commissioners. Careful consideration is constitutionally necessary when the Australian government makes an allocation of funding. The Commonwealth Grants Commission decides how the money will be distributed to each state under the formula, and then a state grants commissioner decides how it will be granted to each local authority.

When it came to R2R we as a government quite wisely went around that system and created a formula, and we have distributed the funds accordingly. Local government consistently reports to me. I did a stint as a local government minister when I commissioned the report and everybody said how pleased they were with the simplicity of managing those funds. That was as important to them as the money itself. Many complained about the complexity involved in servicing state grants for roads. I think that one councillor said to me that they had two full-time staff doing the paperwork relevant to state grants for roads and, in fact, they had nobody specifically allocated to dealing with R2R.

Historically, the Commonwealth has also managed to load responsibilities onto local government not so much by default but by generosity. We have some wonderful schemes. We might give a sports operator a three-year funding package or some other package, at the end of which we say: ‘There you are. You have had your money.’ By this time the community has got to like this particular service, whatever it might be, and so it devolves to local government to continue its operation. Whereas state governments have cost-shifted to local government by default—and I do not see anything in this new intergovernmental agreement that prevents that—the Australian government sometimes, by generosity, has done the same thing.

This thing is going nowhere. Let me say at this point in time, for practical reasons: I do not support the opposition amendment proposing that we have another referendum on constitutional recognition of local government. I always thought the question was meaningless anyway. They virtually told local government that they exist, and I do not think that is the question. There is an established precedent now, and the minister’s speech has a mass of references to the amount of funding that is distributed directly to local government by the Australian government and spasmodically by state governments. The reality is that that is what local government needs. It gets very little constitutional recognition but it has always put its faith in that, when in fact what it needs is money and a clearly defined intergovernmental agreement that identifies the services that local government should provide—in my view, to the exclusion of other providers. Historically, and in most parts of the world, local government is the provider of local education services, local health services and, I might add, local police services.

In my life in local government in Western Australia, for almost the entire period, country local government operated the vehicle licensing system. We issued the licences, we kept the money for our roads and we were obliged to employ a traffic inspector. I have to say, social life in country towns was a lot more comfortable in that period, depending a bit on the attitude of the council. Our attitude was that the man was there to control traffic, not to collect fines. We would go for months without the reporting of a prosecution. The town of Carnarvon was somewhat isolated. It was a bit different to my electorate now, where one shire adjoins another, but the reality was that the traffic inspector’s job was to make sure, under the observation of the elected councillors, that the flow of traffic and the behaviour of drivers were of a satisfactory level. Were one to check the accident crash statistics or the death statistics when that system prevailed, in a positive sense, they were probably quite as good as they would be today with three or four police constables carrying on in the way that they are obliged to do to make sure that they get their total prosecutions each week.

Those sorts of things are typically the responsibility of local government in many parts of the world. What is wrong with an intergovernmental agreement clarifying what you look after? If you are paying 70 per cent of the costs of keeping a doctor in town, why not pick up 100 per cent of the responsibility and then be recognised in the funding packages that come from the Commonwealth or the others so that you do it? I make the point using a local example in Western Australia. We have a very large state government hospital called Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. I do not see that as a responsibility of the City of Nedlands in which it is located. What I am talking about are local hospitals, local schools and local policing problems. I think that local government should have the responsibility in those areas. As minister I told them so. They certainly did not ask for and they certainly did not get the sorts of recommendations that consequently came out of the committee of inquiry, the Hawker committee.

We have all this triplication by the three arms of government. The question is: who would do it better? There is a very interesting situation in a geographically large state like Western Australia: very few people in Western Australia—it does not matter who is the political party in power—vote for the minister for health, the minister for education or the minister for policing, but they know who the shire president or the mayor is and they certainly know how to take revenge on them if they think certain services are not up to an acceptable standard or are not being delivered in the fashion they would prefer. I think this parliament and all governments, whether state or federal, should have an intergovernmental agreement that says: ‘This is my territory. This is what I am responsible for.’ Once that territory is defined, I think there are huge opportunities for local government to be able to do that.

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